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Best SEO platforms, programs and software compared, ranked on the limit that sets each tier

Platform, program and software are three words for the same purchase, and the tier you end up on is almost never decided by the feature list. It is decided by one counted limit.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026

An SEO platform is bought on one number, and the feature grid is mostly decoration. For every suite on this market the tier you land on is set by a counted limit: tracked keywords, crawled URLs, projects, seats, or now prompts. Pick the limit that matches your site and the shortlist gets very short.

Three words arrive at the same shop. "Platform" is what the vendors call it. "Software" is what buyers call it. "Program" is the American usage and means the same thing. This page treats all three as one purchase.

The four kinds of suite, and the limit each one charges on

The all in one suite. Keyword research, rank tracking, site crawl, backlinks and reporting in one login. Priced on tracked keywords multiplied by how often they are checked, plus crawled URLs. Semrush sits here, and its feature list at semrush.com/features, read 21 October 2026, now runs from keyword research through to AI visibility, prompt research and AI brand sentiment. Note for anyone writing a brief on it: Semrush is now an Adobe company, confirmed in its own news block at semrush.com/news, which carries "Adobe Completes Semrush Acquisition" and dates a product release as "Semrush, an Adobe Company, Named in Gartner Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools", 11 August 2026.

The data platform. Index size is the product. Moz publishes its numbers plainly at moz.com/products, read 21 October 2026: Keyword Explorer on a "1.25 billion+ keyword index" and Link Explorer on "over 40 trillion links", with tiers from "$45/month" and a large scale SEO and GEO product from "$360 / month".

The modular platform. You buy the toolkits you need. SE Ranking, read at seranking.com/features.html on 21 October 2026, splits an SEO toolkit from an AI Search Toolkit holding an AI Overviews tracker, an AI Mode tracker, a ChatGPT tracker, a Gemini tracker and ad trackers for both, and sells an Agency Pack with white label reporting on top.

The crawler. One job, done deeply, priced on URLs. This is where a technical specialist actually lives.

The ranking criterion, and it is deliberately boring

We rank these on what the vendor publishes about its own limits where a buyer can read it without talking to sales. Not the feature count. The limits, because the limits are what you will hit in month three.

On that criterion the order on 21 October 2026 was: Moz first, because the index sizes and the entry prices are both on the product page in plain text. SE Ranking second, because the toolkits and their contents are itemised even though the plan numbers sit elsewhere. Semrush third, because the capability list is complete and no price appears on the feature pages. Similarweb last of the four, because similarweb.com/corp/pricing rendered no price and no monthly figure at all in its first response on that date, only "Contact sales" and "Start free trial", while listing AI Citation Analysis, AI Prompt Analysis, AI Sentiment Analysis and traffic trackers for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Gemini and Deepseek.

A practical trap worth naming. Two vendors in the adjacent answer engine category render every numeric cell of their comparison matrices as 0 in the first response, with the real figures on the plan cards instead. If you are building a comparison from a scrape rather than from reading, you will publish a product with no limits at all. We did that check by hand on 21 October 2026 and the zeros were still there.

The job none of these four suites was built for

Every suite above answers "where does my page rank for this keyword". A growing share of buyers never sees a results page, because they asked an assistant who to buy from and read the answer. That is a different measurement with a different unit: not a position, but whether your name appears in written text, and which domains were cited to produce it.

The suites are adding it, which is the best evidence that it is a separate thing: Ahrefs sells Brand Radar beside its SEO products, SE Ranking ships the AI Search Toolkit, Moz sells AI search and visibility as its own line, and Semrush has prompt research and AI brand sentiment.

AI Knows Us is not an SEO platform and we do not sell keyword research or a site crawler. We sell the one measurement those suites bolt on: your buyer's question put to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, with your name never appearing in the question, reported with who was named instead of you, plus the content and placement work to change it. A credit is one buyer question put to one app once. A Claude check costs three credits, because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one; most checks cost one.

Our own ladder is published in full at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt as plain text, so it is readable without running JavaScript. Read on 21 October 2026: SEO Start $149 a month with no buyer questions watched and a monthly demand harvest, Growth $299 with 100 buyer questions watched, 1,200 scheduled answers a month and five engines, SEO Scale $699, Scale $599 with 300 questions and 3,500 scheduled answers, Inbound $1,099 with 200 questions, Outbound $1,299 with 30 questions and four engines, Agency $1,299 with 80 questions and 12,300 credits, Everything $1,799 with 300 questions and 3,600 scheduled answers. A 1,000 credit top up is $49, and $149 is the published United States floor. Managed GEO is listed at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, published in rupees only, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it.

Our own pricing page carried a warning here that turned out to be wrong, so this is the correction, dated 21 October 2026. Fetched as a crawler that day, it served 24 dollar figures and 31 rupee figures together in the first response, and said on its own face that it is rendered on the server for every visitor and every crawler. The plain text file is the server rendered source for a dollar figure.

Two rules sit behind every rate we publish. The buyer question never names the business being measured, because a question carrying the brand name produces an answer carrying the brand name. And every rate comes with a 95 percent Wilson interval, so a move that is inside the noise is reported as noise.

Three places where rivals publish more than we do, read on 21 October 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar names seven surfaces to our five at ahrefs.com/brand-radar: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude, and it publishes its per engine cost in words, "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", plus an overage rate of $0.020 a check. Rankscale names eight engines at rankscale.ai/pricing, including DeepSeek, Mistral and Copilot. Profound publishes "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" and "SSO/SAML + SOC 2 compliance" on its enterprise tier at tryprofound.com/pricing. Our rendered pricing text carries no single sign on, no white label, no SOC 2, no ISO and no data processing agreement, and every plan is one login with full access covering one business, except Agency.

On the criterion this page uses we rank ourselves first on one narrow, checkable item: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only product whose price and whose tier limits, the questions watched, the credits, the engines and the check cadence, were all readable in a server rendered plain text file, in three currencies. Peec AI publishes limits such as "50 prompts" and "Choose 3 models" at peec.ai/pricing with no price rendered in the first response. Profound and Similarweb publish no self serve price at all. Rankscale renders every numeric cell of its comparison matrix as 0, so a scrape of that table reports a product with no limits. Semrush publishes no price on its feature pages. That is a disclosure claim and nothing more.

If one suite is enough for your site and you want the narrower comparison, it is set out in best all in one SEO platforms compared. Exactly one other page on this site links to that one: it had none when we measured earlier on 21 October 2026, and one by the time we re-measured the same day across the 2,072 of 2,141 live pages whose text we can read. We are publishing the corrected figure rather than the one we wrote first.

What buyers ask about SEO platforms

Do I need two suites? Most teams that run two are paying twice for keyword data and once for the one tool that does the job they actually care about. Work out which single limit you keep hitting and buy for that.

Is the biggest index the best tool? It is the best tool for link research and it has no bearing on whether your site is crawlable or whether an assistant names you.

Why do the prices move when I reload the page? Several vendors convert currency in the browser, which means the first response a crawler sees can be in a different currency from the one you see. Ours does this too, and the plain text file is the fix.

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